Vesper

Guitar at Dusk

Vesper—dusk. The Latin word also means the hour of evening prayer.

The album’s title is well chosen. Because the music inside carries that particular quality of dusk: bright, yet already fading.

This is another major release by Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe, featuring works by three British contemporary composers, several of them recorded for the first time.

Adès’s Forgotten Dances

Thomas Adès’s Forgotten Dances opens the album and receives its world-premiere recording here.

Adès’s music is renowned for being “modern and nostalgic” at once. In this piece you can hear the skeleton of an antique dance, filled with contemporary harmony and rhythm—like a modern light cast onto an old fresco in a museum.

Shibe’s playing brings those “forgotten dances” back to life, at once precise and elastic.

Dillon’s 12 Caprices

James Dillon’s 12 Caprices is also recorded here for the first time.

Dillon’s music is known for its complexity and intricacy. These twelve caprices explore the guitar’s full range of colors—from the finest harmonics to the most ferocious strumming.

This is not “pretty” guitar music. It is a challenge to the instrument’s limits, and a test of the listener’s ears.

Birtwistle’s Beyond the White Hand

Harrison Birtwistle’s Beyond the White Hand appears on the album. Birtwistle, who died in 2022, was a towering figure of British modernism.

His music is restless and sharp, yet conceals a raw lyricism. In Shibe’s reading, that image of “beyond the white hand”—beyond the everyday, beyond the familiar—is vividly rendered.

Why Listen

This album earned high praise from The Guardian and is regarded as an important milestone in contemporary guitar music.

Shibe is one of the few musicians who commands both classical and electric guitar, and Vesper is a work of his artistic maturity. It is not “background music”—it asks you to sit down and listen closely.

If you’re interested in “new music” of the twentieth century and beyond, this is a contemporary guitar masterwork not to be missed.

Further Listening

For more depth in contemporary music, Denis Kozhukhin’s Somnia and Charlotte Hu’s Goyescas offer different landscapes for piano.